And what about the voice of O’Gillicuddy? Was that imagination, too, as seeing them back at the settlement may have been, or imagining again that we had seen strange shapes back at the cave when they first had come to us? The trouble was that I was not the only one who was hearing it. Cynthia was hearing it as well as I, or she acted as if she did. Either that, or I imagined that she did. It was a hell of a thing, I told myself-to question not only the reality of your environment, but the reality of yourself as well.
“Cynthia,” I asked her, “are you really hearing all of this . . .”
The fire exploded in front of us. Ash and fire and burning brands sprayed across the cave and onto us. From outside came a hollow boom and then another and something traveling very fast smacked into the rock behind us.
We leaped to our feet, all three of us, and as we did something boiled inside the space between the rocks. Something-I don’t know what it was-but something like a tidal wave that had come charging in upon us, although it certainly was not water, and having come in, swirled and rolled with a mighty churning force.
Then it was gone and we hadn’t stirred. For all the boiling and the swirling of whatever it had been, it had not affected us, for we stood, the two of us, exactly where we’d stood when we jumped up to our feet.
But the fire was gone. There was no sign of it. And instead of night, there was brilliant sunlight shining on the valley just beyond the cleft.
Chapter 18
The valley was different. Nothing that one could pick out to start with, on the moment, and say this is not the same and something else is different. But it had a different look and as we stood in the mouth of the cleft, we began to pick out those things that were different.
There were fewer trees, for one thing, and they all were smaller. And it wasn’t autumn, for all the trees were green. The grass seemed different, too, not as lush, not as green, but with a yellow cast to it.
“They did it,” Cynthia whispered. “They did it without even asking us.”
I stood there, wondering if this was all a fantasy that was a piece with the fantasy of O’Gillicuddy and hoping that it was, knowing that if one of them were fantasy the other surely must be.
“But he said a fraction of a second,” Cynthia said, “and that would have been enough. Any little sliver of time that would shield us from the present. The flicker of an eyelash would have put us out of it.”
“They blundered,” I told her. “They blundered very badly.”
For I knew it was no fantasy. We had been moved in time and over a much greater segment of time than the small part of a second of which O’Gillicuddy had spoken.
“They never tried it before,” I said. “They weren’t even sure they could really do it. We were their first experiment and the damn fools blundered.”
We walked out into the valley, into the bright sunlight, and I glanced up at the cliff walls and there were no cedars growing there.
A surge of anger swept over me. There was no telling I how far back we had been thrown. Back at least to a time before the cedars had taken root, and the cedar, if I remembered rightly, took an enormous amount of time to grow. | Some of the cedars that had been growing on those rocky walls might have been centuries old.
We’d had it now, I thought. Before, up in our present, we had been lost in space, but now we were lost in time, fl And there was no way we could be sure of getting back. A time-trap, O’Gillicuddy had said, but if he knew no more of time-traps than he did of moving people into time, there 1 could be no assurance that he could do what he said he ”’ would.
“We’re a long way back, aren’t we?” asked Cynthia.
“You’re damned right we are,” I said. “God knows how far back. And I don’t suppose our clever ghosts know ‘ about it, either.”
“But the ghouls were out there, Fletch.”
“Of course they were,” I said, “and it would have taken all of three seconds for Wolf to scatter them. There was no real need to send us back. O’Gillicuddy got stampeded.”
“Wolfs not with us,” said Cynthia. “Poor Wolf. They couldn’t send him back. What’ll we do now for a rabbit-catcher?”
“We’ll catch them ourselves,” I said.
“I feel lonely without Wolf,” she said. “It took so little time to get used to him.”
“They couldn’t do a thing about ij,” I told her. “He was I nothing but a robot…”
“A mutant robot,” she said.
“There are no mutant robots.”
“I think there are,” she said. “Or could be. Wolfj changed. What was it made him change?”
“Elmer threw the fear of God in him when he busted up ^
his pals. Wolf got converted quick and switched to the winning side.”
“No, it couldn’t have been that. Sure, it would have scared him, but it would not have changed him the way that he was changed. You know what I think, Fletch?”
“I have no idea.”
“He evolved,” she said. “A robot could evolve.”
“Perhaps,” I said, not at all convinced, but I had to say something to stop her chattering. “Let’s look around a bit to find out where we are.”
“And when we are?”
“That, too,” I said. “If we can manage it.”
We went down the valley, moving slowly and somewhat uncertainly. There was, of course, no need to hurry now; there was no one at our heels. But it was not only that. There was, I think, in our slowness and uncertainty, a kind of reluctance to travel out into this world, a fear of what it might contain, not knowing what one might expect, and a consciousness, as well, that we were in the past, in an unknown alien time and that we had no right to be there. Somehow this world had a different texture to it-not only the lack of lush greenness in the grass or the smaller trees-but a sense of some strange difference that probably had no physical basis, but was entirely psychological.
We went on down the valley, not really going anywhere, going without purpose. The hills fell back a little and the valley widened and ahead of us other hills ranged blue into the sky. We could see that the valley we were traveling joined another valley and in a mile or so we reached the river into which the stream we had been following poured its waters. It was a wide river, running very fast, its waters dark and oily with their speed and as it ran it talked in a growling undertone. It was somehow a little frightening to look upon that river.
“There’s something over there,” said Cynthia.
I looked where she was pointing.
“It looks like a house,” she said.
“I don’t see a house.”
“I just saw the roof. Or what looked like a roof. It’s hidden in the trees.” “Let us go,” I said.
We reached the field before we really saw the house. A thin, scraggly stand of corn, knee-high or less, grew in uneven rows that were choked with weeds. There was no fence. The field stood on a small bench above the river and was hemmed in by trees. Here and there the rows were broken by standing stumps. Off to one side of the field bare skeletons of trees were piled in ragged clumps. Someone, not too long ago, had cleared a patch to make a field, hauling off the trees once they had been cut down.
The house stood across the field, on an elevation slightly higher than the patch of corn. It was a ramshackle affair even from a distance; it became more ramshackle as we approached it. A weedy garden lay off to one side of it and behind it was another structure I took to be a barn. No livestock was in sight. In fact, nothing living was in sight. The place had a vacant feel about it, as if someone had been there just a while ago, but now was gone. A sagging bench stood in front of the house, beside the open door, and beside it was a chair, with the legs cut down, the back ones shorter than the front so that anyone who sat in it would be tilted back. In the yard, a battered pail lay on its side, rolling a little in the wind. A sawed-off section of a large tree bole sat on its end, apparently a chopping block, for its upper end was scarred in places where an axe had struck. A cross-cut saw rested on two pegs or nails on the cabin wall. A hoe leaned against the wall.